70 Quotes by Shirley Hazzard

He was familiar enough with pleasure to know it might become jaded or reluctant; but joy was literally foreign to him, a word he would never easily pronounce, an exhilaration that had some other reckless nationality. For this reason, Caro’s wholeness in love, her happiness in it, made her exotic.

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of.

I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn’t true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

The universal odour of bookshop, closed all night on the mildews of its ranked treasures, brought a past life before him – as is said to happen in drowning. But how, he wondered, entering and taking up a book, and even breathing it in to sustain remembrance, could one ever verify or explode the myth, except by drowning.

Marriage is like democracy – it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with...

Did you ever notice how easy it is to forgive a person any number of faults for one endearing characteristic, for a certain style, or some commitment to life – while someone with many good qualities is insupportable for a single defect if it happens to be a boring one?

I have never suffered greatly... If you can reach fifty without a catastrophe, you’ve won. You’ve got away with it.

In England, life is a long process of composing oneself...

Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that was neither the moment nor the true self.